


Graves Registration

by starcunning (Vannevar)



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Gen, Imperial Guard, Imperial Navy, Mortuary Affairs, Quartermaster Corps
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-06
Updated: 2014-06-06
Packaged: 2018-02-03 16:06:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1750538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vannevar/pseuds/starcunning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the care and keeping of Guardsman Lynn Hallowell, a Gudrunite soldier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Graves Registration

When the war has moved on from the battlefield, it leaves behind markers of its passing in scars upon the earth. The Adepts of Mars come to reclaim what remains of their engines of war. The Imperial Guard do the same for their soldier dead.

Sister Sophia signs the transfer paperwork and scrubs her hands before she begins for the day. She has six, today. Six of what she doesn’t allow herself to think of any longer. That had been a piece of advice from her last superior officer: that the hardest thing about her job was that they still looked like people.  
The hardest part these days was the lack of visitors.  
First on the list: believed to be Lynn Hallowell. Two entries, further down, have the same surname. Sophia takes a deep breath and lets that pass from her mind.

The Guardsman believed to be Lynn Hallowell has brown eyes, still open, never seeing. Her right arm ends in a chewed off stump below the elbow; her right side is a mangled ruin. Sophia draws no conclusions from this. That will be someone else’s job. She transfers the soldier believed to be Lynn Hallowell to a human remains pouch and begins to prep for cryo, carefully coating her fingertips, nose, and ears in an insulative gel so that frostbite cannot blacken the tissue.

Sister Sophia was meant to be a Hospitaller, but landed at the Graves Registration outpost after she confessed to writing another medic’s term paper. She was lucky: she got to decide where she landed. The other medic had been turfed elsewhere with no say. Sophia still would have trusted her to stitch up any battlefield injuries she came across.

Sophia checks the personal effects sent along with the remains: six picts, two letters, a volume of poetry. The author is no one she recognizes. She counts the picts out face down, seals the items in a vacuum-locked pouch, and puts the pouch in a compartment of the cryo tube. She will do this five more times today before she is relieved.

— — — — —

Magos Biologis Dorian receives the tube months later, at the Battlefleet Scarus outpost on the edge of the Ophidian Subsector. He takes custody of it and a half-dozen like it, carried to him in the belly of a Munitorum ship returning from a supply distribution run. During the transfer, the cryo elements have been disabled, and the Guardsman believed to be Lynn Hallowell has thawed when he begins his examination, chattering incessantly in technalingua as he works, the servo-skull behind him spitting out reams of paper as it transcribes his observations.

Thanks to an enlistment dental record and the presence of a unit tattoo on the corpse’s right shoulder, gene-testing is not necessary to verify her identity. Magos Dorian declares these the remains of Lynn Hallowell, and he strips her of her flak vest and fatigues. The vest will be destroyed, he knows; it cannot be made suitable for re-issue. He removes Lynn Hallowell’s identification tags from around her neck. In one of the pockets of her fatigues he finds an icon to a local saint he does not recognize. He recognizes only the spiritual authority of the Omnissiah.

Magos Dorian remembers filing a report after a spate of Guardsmen from the same regiment passed through his depot, all of them dead from shrapnel wounds to the neck. He remembers fighting for years before the Munitorum agreed to look at proposals to add an armored collar to the regiment’s dress. He rarely sees that regiment with such an injury any more. Now, it is the sons and daughters of a different world that come to his table with their throats torn open. He will write another recommendation soon, when he has enough data.

Magos Dorian begins his autopsy. In its course he picks out a dozen rusted teeth that belong to a chainsword model not issued in the Imperial Guard for decades. He determines the trauma to her internal organs and loss of blood as the cause of her death, catalogues her tags and icon, and adds them to the manifest of her personal effects, right below the volume of Helican poetry. For a half second he wonders what meaning she found in Stearns’ ballads. If she recognized their debt to Karkasy’s Odes. Then he forcibly terminated that line of thought, overwriting the moment of recognition with junk data. He thinks no more of Lynn Hallowell, remanding the keeping of her corpse to a mortuary.

— — — — —

Thomas Winston closes her eyes at last. He washes Lynn’s body gently, as one might a child, and seals the rent in her side and her mangled arm with caps of wax dyed the golden color of her skin in an enlistment photograph. While the last of her blood is being flushed from her body, supplanted with embalming fluid, he recites prayers to commend her soul to the God-Emperor of Mankind.

Thomas is the fourth son of a funeral director on a world called Spectre, barely more than a fog-wreathed archipelago. His older siblings will inherit the family business, and the world is too small to have demand enough to support the three of them, never mind Thomas himself. It pays its tithes in salted fish, which are processed at a plant on one of the larger islands. The plant is run by the Munitorum. On the day of his majority, Thomas Winston signed on with the Munitorum. The Imperial Guard and Navy would always have more than enough work to keep him busy.

He washes Lynn’s hair with a quiet reverence until the water runs clear and blood spray no longer mats the dark, straight strands to her cheek. He dries it, brushes it, pulls it back into a ponytail at the nape of her neck in accordance with Gudrunite uniform regulations. On a scaffold of wire mesh, Thomas builds Lynn a new arm and gently attaches it to the stump of her right arm.

He has her measurements and service record on a dataslate, and assembles and presses her dress uniform, diligently removing loose threads and polishing the brass buttons. He collects her ribbons from a bin, each one containing a hundred decorations, and tries not to think of how often his supplies are replenished. He has been a member of the quartermaster corps for three years. Each of his tours of duty lasts a year. He knows it’s lenient. He knows most guardsmen won’t see home for a decade.

He knows that most of them that do pass over his table, where he dresses them and carefully measures the placement of their ribbons and badges. Everything exact. Everything perfect. His predecessor had been discharged after sending a wedding band home with the wrong remains.

— — — — —

Chloe Barker was born on an Imperial Navy ship. Throne willing, she’ll die on one. Her mother was a citizen of Imperial Hesperus. She followed her into service, but the arm of Battlefleet Scarus she serves rarely leaves the sector. Chloe hasn’t left the Helican subsector in nine months. She pilots an Arvus Lighter. Today, she’s taking it to Gudrun, to a major city on its northern continent.

If the Lord-Commander of the Imperial Guard were, for some reason, to be riding in her little hog, he’d have to sit far to the back, just aft of the servitors tucked beside the back bay of her pinnace. The soldier dead of the Imperial Guard outrank everyone still living. Out of respect for them, she keeps her machine spotless and in excellent repair.

Chloe thinks that of the six she’s got with her today, she can expect to see one family local enough or wealthy enough or concerned enough to make the trip in person. The smaller the town, the larger the turnout, she’s found. Except for Cadia. She’s only been to Cadia once; usually they can take care of their own, but they’d been overwhelmed logistically and Scarus had sent her to support in returning their dead to them.  
She had never seen so many awaiting her arrival.

She remembers her last trip to Mirepoix: one soldier had sat in cryo for six months at Ophidian, waiting for a companion, until they’d finally processed him alone and given him into her keeping. The airfield had been empty. The Guard officer she’d eventually surrendered the coffin to explained that his parents were divorced and disagreeing about funeral arrangements. Chloe had wept.

She used to stand at the back bay and oversee the servitors as they unloaded their precious cargo. One of the Guardsmen’s mothers had been present to receive her daughter’s remains and had been hysterical. She had never wanted her only child to enter the service. In her grief she had vented her spleen at her dead child, and all the dead traveling with her, and at Chloe. As much as her words hurt Chloe to hear, she couldn’t turn her back on the grieving woman and retreat.  
But Chloe doesn’t stand at the bay door any longer.

The servitors in her cargo bay were soldiers. They volunteered for conversion. Whether post-mortem or because of a terminal injury she doesn’t know, but nobody who handles the remains of the Guard has ever been coerced into it.

It was sunny on Gudrun as Chloe brought her little pig down into the hangar. The mourners, dressed in grey, looked like ghosts. The family crowd around Lynn Hallowell’s body. Her five fellows are given into the keeping of the Departmento Munitorum, to be brought swiftly to their hometowns by more local transit. Chloe waits in quiet reverence for the mourners to disperse before she recalls her servitors and awaits her next troop.

Her mother thinks it’s a grim job, but Chloe knows she doesn’t serve the dead. The Guardsmen she bears home have already been commended to the side of the Emperor, to serve Him in glory. For her this is already a fact. For those whose loved ones spend the coin of their lives on distant shores, closure is necessary. She serves those still living.


End file.
